Laura Blum

Don't go see Timbuktu expecting revival of Kismet. Abderrahmane Sissako's latest film offers a somewhat more subdued portrait of Mali's spiritual and intellectual capital, one where music is banned. So are soccer, cigarettes, laughter and unveiled women, among other prohibitions being slapped on local citizens in 2012, as mujahideen spread their brand of Sharia to the West African nation's northern tier.

We first meet these zealots barreling across the desert in a pick-up truck chasing a gazelle. "Don't kill it, just tire it!" yells one AK-47-toting militant. The same could be said of their tactics for subuding the cultural and religious life of their reluctant hosts. Yet for their next target -- animist statues and masks -- they reserve no such mercy. The idolatrous artifacts are dispatched with a swift rain of bullets.

In their puritan fervor, they'll even shoot up dunes. One such suggestive mound is near the tent where a Tuareg family enjoys a bucolic life. There herdsman Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed) makes music with his spirited wife Satima (Toulou Kiki), 12-year-old daughter Toya (Layla Walet Mohamed) and adopted orphan Issan (Mehdi AG Mohamed). Their harmony is shortlived. Lybian-born leader Abdelkrim (Abel Jafri) descends on their neck of the desert to make Satima cover her head. The neighbors have fled, but Kidane lacks his wife's urgency about moving closer to town. When a fisherman, Amadou, kills his prize cow, Kidane triggers an accident that puts his fate in the hands of militant judges.

Kidane's tragic act is captured in an elegiac widescreen shot as the sun sinks over silvery waters. For Sissako, the confrontation shifts from a brush up between mere mortals to a reckoning with kismet. (Again, no musicals here.) The mood is palpably empathic as DP Sofiane El Fani's camera lingers in moral meditation. By contrast, a scene of a couple being stoned to death is telescoped as senseless and ungodly, meriting none of the same soul searching.

As Sissako explained at the press conference during the New York Film Festival, where Timbuktu had its US premiere, he was moved to make the film after reading about the fatal stoning of a Malian couple whose children were born out of wedlock. Just as his characters resist injustice by flouting fatwas -- the image of youth playing soccer without a ball is a standout -- Sissako himself lobs beauty, hope and humanity as his cinematic protest against fanatic intolerance.

What we get is nuance, not caricature. In Sissako's Timbuktu, even the bad guys have remorse and uncertainty. Take the example of Kidane's death sentence. Though he asks not to be translated, the Arabic-speaking legal aide says he is pained by the fatherless daughter who will be left behind. In another scene, a young militant can't quite bring himself to denounce his former calling of rap while being filmed for a jihadist video. The very diehards to outlaw soccer themselves hotly debate the merits of star players Zidane and Messi. We can recognize ourselves in these misguided souls, and that's just the point. There's a potential for good and evil in all of us, Sissako seems to be saying.

No one, in other words, can be complaisant; anyone can go astray. Where does that lay the responsibility for Mali's takeover? There are no easy answers, yet Sissako is not content to point fingers at the intruders and leave it at that. Wasn't Kidane cruising for trouble by bringing a gun to what was sure to be an angry confrontation? How is it that a nice Tuareg cow is named GPS? Have its minders lost their cultural way? What part has Timbuktu, an ancient center of Islamic civilization, played in the dimming of its own light? (It's worth noting that instability surrounding the Tuareg Rebellion of 2012 and resulting coup d'état ousting President Amadou Toumani Touré helped pave the way for such Islamist groups as Ansar Dine in Northern Mali.)

In Sissako's bittersweet fable, women appear to be the future's hope. From the fish monger (Zikra Oualet Moussa) who risks having her hands severed rather than wear modesty gloves, to the chanteuse (Fatoumata Diawara) who sings while receiving 40 lashes, to the Haitian shaman (Kettly Noël) whose very earthquaking spirit embodies defiance, it's the distaff denizens who stand up to the oppressors. The contrasting cowardice of the townsmen is summed up early on when a male is commanded to roll up his pants and slips out of them altogether, draping himself in humiliation. Manly resistence falls on the shoulders of the local imam (Adel Mahmoud Cherif), who speaks for Sissako in distinguishing between Islam and fundamentalism. As he admonishes the jihadists, "You cause harm to Islam and the Muslims. Where is the compassion? Where is the forgiveness?...Where is God in all this?" It's not lost on him or us that these arms-fortified, truck-crazy, cell-phone dependent crusaders worship technology despite their ubiquitous black banners that proclaim, "There is no God but Allah..."

Whether Mauritania’s first-ever Oscar-nominated entry takes home an idolatrous statue remains to be seen. But either way it's a winner rendered all the more noteworthy as Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) redescends on Mali three years after the incursion that inspired the film.